“You sound like a revolutionary,” Helen said.
Annick laughed, a deep throaty sound, her head thrown back and her graceful white neck bared. “Never. I love the high life. If you know how to play it, Saigon offers the best life.”
“So you stayed?”
“I tasted freedom. We stay on, just hoping it will last a bit longer. The sisters will put silk on the backs of the Americans now. But they will remain long after all of us have been banished.”
“I went on my first assignment in the field yesterday and forgot to shoot my camera, I was so terrified.” The words come out with a rush. “So terrified I slept with a man last night I shouldn’t have. Too scared to stay and too scared to leave.”
Annick stared at her for a moment. “It seems I have become your friend just in time.”
At first, afraid she had started something with Darrow she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue, Helen was relieved when she didn’t hear from him. After several more days of not hearing from him, she realized that she had been dismissed without knowing it.
She struggled to make her way around Saigon alone, avoiding Robert in her embarrassment. When she returned to her hotel, she skirted the front desk, afraid of messages from Darrow, more afraid of none. Impatient, she frowned at the elevator, waiting for one of the bellboys to run over to her with a note: “Very important message. Mr. Darrow say urgent.” But not a single word came. It occurred to her that the drawer beside his bed might be full of keys; he relied on the fact that they wouldn’t be used. But she had used hers. In a rush to make the night before not seem a mistake, she had dropped off the green bedspread she had bought from Annick, gone so far as to make the bed with it. Pathetic. One more colossal blunder.
After a week had passed, Helen found out through her room boy that Darrow had been on assignment and was back. The answer to why he hadn’t called. He hadn’t bothered to inform her of the fact of a trip, but she could forgive that. In her relief, she sprouted affection for him. He was at his room in the hotel. She hurriedly changed into a linen dress, brushed her hair, and applied the pale pink lipstick Annick had given her. She made herself walk, not run, to his room. When she knocked, he answered distractedly, “Come in.”
Sunlight streamed through the dusty windows, opaque through the tape used to keep them from shattering from bombs. The air smelled of dirty fatigues piled on the floor, stale cigarette smoke. The desperate feelings she had talked herself into minutes before abandoned her. She again felt like a fool.
Linh, bowing his head at her entrance, sat in a chair by the window, going through contact sheets with a magnifying loupe.
Darrow didn’t move toward her but stayed at a large table piled with bags of equipment. His face was drawn, eyes invisible behind the glare of glasses.
She stood in the middle of the room, fingering the rough material of her dress, searching for an excuse for her presence, cursing herself for having come there. Finally she offered up “I heard you were back.”
“Yesterday,” he said, continuing to unpack cameras from a muddied bag. “I spent last night developing film.”
“Oh.”
She noticed the tremor again in his hands as he lifted equipment. She was making a spectacle of herself, another Tick-Tock. She hated being the kind of woman to insist that a night together had meant something.
“You remember Linh,” Darrow said.
Linh rose and nodded to her as she crossed the room to hold out her hand. Blinded with hurt, it was as if she were meeting him for the first time. He stood and took her hand awkwardly, and she noticed without thinking the scarred skin along one wrist. What had he done before becoming a photographer’s assistant? It occurred to her that perhaps a woman wasn’t supposed to shake hands with a Vietnamese man.
“I dropped some things off at the apartment. Just a thank-you for taking me along that day.” Fool, idiot. Just get out of there.
“I saw.” Darrow lit a cigarette and offered her one.
“Was the bedspread okay? I bought one for my hotel room. The one there was too depressing, and I figured why not get two for the price…” She couldn’t stop talking, sounded ridiculous. She should die on the spot, of humiliation and bad judgment.
Silence in the room as he let her hang herself.
“It was fine. Linh, give us a minute.”
“Sure.” Linh, bowing even lower than he had the first time, not meeting her eyes, quickly left.
She felt stranded as the door closed behind him; she wanted to go out also, instead of staying and listening to what was coming. The lock shut so softly one only knew he was gone from the tap of his footsteps fading down the hallway.
Feigning interest, she walked over to the table by the window and was heartened to see the photo of herself on top of a pile of prints.
“Let me ask you one thing.” Darrow said.
“What?”
“Did you really come halfway around the world to a war zone so you could play house with a married man?”
She pressed her fingers into the table, stared at the photograph of herself while she tried to gather her thoughts, arranged her face enough to carry herself out the room. She picked up her photograph, crumpling it in her fist.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Darrow said. “I had a great time, but I’m just thinking of you.”
She turned and looked at him. “You had me fooled.”
“Why’s that? Didn’t you say you would never love someone like me? So what’s it now? Our Lady of Doomed Loves?”
“You are a grade-A prick.”
Darrow sat on the bed with his legs crossed and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Sad fact is, Helen, baby, I can’t save you.”
She slammed the door behind her, hating herself for the theatrics but grateful she had at least left before tears. Relief topped mortification. Plenty of time for that later. He was right-this wasn’t what she had come for.
In the dim hallway, she leaned against the wall. Sick at the absurdity of the dress and lipstick, she swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. The balled-up picture fell to the ground. When she looked up, Linh stood there. He kneeled to pick up her photo, smoothed it on his knee, and held it out to her.
FIVE. Chieu Hoi
Open Arms
Her bags remained packed in a neat pile in the middle of her hotel room, but the days passed by, one after another, and still Helen didn’t leave.
She could not face returning home a failure. A mode of being so ingrained she did not even recognize it. Her mother had remarried a year after their father’s death, a close family friend who had become widowed. As like their father as could be. When Helen cried before the wedding, in jealousy, in fear, in betrayal, her mother sat her down and gave her “the speech.” The speech would start with the particulars of the situation and then boil up to the universal truism that failure was not an option. Ever. “This man will be a good husband and a good father to you two. End of subject.”
When Michael and Helen were teenagers, they would hide on the beach and smoke pot and drink alcohol with friends and caricature their mother, her grim pragmatism, how she buried the second husband ten years later and declared that she was done with men. “ ‘Failure not an option,’ she probably told him in bed,” Helen said, thrilled by her rebellion.
A friend of hers, Reba, curly red hair spilling down her back, who had a crush on Michael,
